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German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent a clear “I told you so!” to the United States and Britain at the weekend, criticising them in unusually frank terms for resisting measures that might have contained the current financial crisis. The conservative leader of Europe’s largest economy reminded her partners that she had pushed for steps to boost the transparency of hedge funds during Germany’s presidency of the Group of Eight last year. ”We got things moving, but we didn’t get enough support, especially in the United States and Britain,” she told the Muenchner Merkur newspaper. Merkel expanded on her point in a speech in Austria, suggesting that both Washington and London were only now coming around to her view.

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There was an awkward moment on Sunday, when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili stood next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Tbilisi and thanked her for having “initiated” plans to bring his country into NATO.

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The ferocity of the reaction in the German media to the fortress-like new U.S. embassy in Berlin, which former U.S. President George Bush will inaugurate on Friday, strikes me as a reflection of the strains in German-U.S. relations since 2003′s Iraq conflict.

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At any one of the dozen high-powered Berlin summer parties thrown by major media outlets and the political parties in Germany each year you can count on finding a reasonable cross-section of government and industry movers and shakers to rub elbows with. But nowhere in Germany can you find as rich an assortment of A-list government, business, media and entertainment industry types as at the “Sommerfest” held by Bild newspaper.

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It hasn’t garnered as much attention or generated quite the same excitement as the nomination battle between U.S. Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did, but Germany’s Social Democrats are tying themselves in equally torturous knots over who will lead their party into the next election.

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Berlin has had a deep and enduring love affair with American presidents. Berliners have never forgotten the U.S. leaders who helped keep West Berlin free during the Cold War with the Airlift and many can still recite the words of John F. Kennedy’s legendary “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech at City Hall in 1963.

So it is all the more glaring that George W. Bush has once again avoided the German capital on his fifth and final visit to the country , spending just minutes at Berlin airport on his way in and out of Germany.

It was also odd that Bush failed to mention the Airlift, one of the brightest moments of post-war U.S. foreign policy, at his news conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel in the rural village of Meseberg (pop. 150) about 100 km (60 miles) north of the capital. The Airlift’s 60th anniversary is being marked this month and was supposed to be the reason for Bush’s visit.

Perhaps it was the memories of 10,000 anti-war protesters who disrupted Bush’s first and only stay in Berlin in May 2002. Or maybe it was the recollections of the 10,000 German police needed to guard him in the centre of Berlin, which he turned into a veritable ghost town. Bush lamented about “living in a bubble” when he was here for 20 hours in 2002. His next trip was to Mainz, a provincial city in the far west — there were anti-war protests there too. After that he went to small northeastern villages in 2006 and 2007 — but stayed clear of Berlin.

The reason is clear — Iraq. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder won re-election against long odds in 2002 by standing up to Bush on Iraq, a hugely popular position in war-scarred Germany that nevertheless got him ostracised by Bush.

Differences were later patched up, but even Bush acknowledged in Meseberg on Wednesday: “It’s obviously been a contentious issue between our countries in the past.”

Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper columnist Kurt Kister wrote: “Bush is spending his entire visit hidden away in the provincial town of Meseberg. Meseberg has the advantage that it’s easy to seal it off from the rest of the world with fences
and police. It’s not surprising because for the overwhelming majority of Germans Bush is the most unpopular U.S. president in the last two generations.”

As an American who’s lived in Berlin for much of the past 15 years, I have felt at first hand the city’s affinity for all things American. In 1994, I saw tears running down the cheeks of American GIs, overwhelmed by 250,000 cheering Berliners giving them a
thunderous farewell, as the city’s Cold War defence force marched in a farewell parade .

And I have seen the tens of thousands that lined the streets to cheer Bill Clinton in 1993, when he became the first U.S. president to walk through the Brandenburg Gate, and in 1998 when he came to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Airlift. Clinton even went for jogs in the city’s Tiergarten park and dropped into trendy restaurants with only minimal protection.

So, after watching Bush avoid Berlin for the fourth time and knowing how fond Berliners are of America, I’m wondering what’s next. Will the next U.S. president be able to or want to walk the streets of Berlin again? Will that perhaps be a useful barometer? What does it say about the state of international affairs if the world’s most powerful leader doesn’t feel welcome and safe in a city that, in many ways, owes its very survival to U.S. presidents?